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In this maiden post (Part 1) i would like to discuss and elaborate about ASM installation and related areas.

Prerequisites:
Considering that you already have the OS ready with all packages per-installed before we begin our ASM installation on the top. I will start with right from the scratch.

Step 1:
Preparing Disks or Partitions which will be used while creating the ASM diskgroups.
I’ve created 3 Persistent Disks each of 4GB in size from the VM Disk (I will perform all steps in VM environment).

This is how the VM Setting will look like once you are done with the Disk creation.
*Forgot about the Fifth Hard Disk of 10GB for now. Will explain the usage later on the series.

Once you have the disks created, Next you’ll have to format the newly created disks to make them usable: Using fdisk command. Command displays the status of available newly created partitions/disks as:
/dev/sdb, /dev/sdc, /dev/sdd – Each of 4GB (4294 MBs) in size.

Next you have to make each of the newly created raw partition as valid and usable primary partition.
Below step performs the said for one of the disk /dev/sdc. You will have to perform the same step for rest of the two disks as well and save the change using ‘w’ argument of fdisk.

Next is to install the optional ASMLIB packages. ASMLib is an optional utility that can be used on Linux systems to manage Oracle ASM devices. You can download the ASM packages from Oracle’s website.
– All ASMLib installations require that the ‘kmod-oracleasm’,’oracleasmlib’ and ‘oracleasm-support’ packages be
installed on the system.
– Packages required (RHEL 64 Bit, 11gR2) are:
oracleasm-support-2.1.8-1.el6.x86_64.rpm, oracleasmlib-2.0.4-1.el6.x86_64.rpm

I prefer using Packages using YUM – Otherwise you can use the direct RPM’s.
Example:

Now that the ASMLib software is installed, a few steps have to be taken by the system administrator to make the ASM driver available. The ASM driver needs to be loaded, and the driver filesystem needs to be mounted.

Run the oracleasm script with the ‘configure’ option. It will ask for the user and group that default to owning the ASM driver access point. If the database was running as the ‘oracle’ user and the ‘dba’ group, the output would look like this:

This will configure the on-boot properties of the Oracle ASM library
driver. The following questions will determine whether the driver is
loaded on boot and what permissions it will have. The current values
will be shown in brackets (‘[]’). Hitting without typing an
answer will keep that current value. Ctrl-C will abort.

Next when you have all the disks ready to use – Install Grid Infrastructure Binaries!!
Now we are ready to perform the binary installations. Lets first install the GI binaries. To do it mount or copy the Oracle software.
Patch Name: ‘13390677’
You will have to download three of the packages out of the total bundle available. First 2 are for database and third zip contains Oracle Grid Infrastructure, includes: Oracle ASM, Oracle Clusterware, Oracle Restart software.
Names:
p13390677_112040_platform_1of7.zip (Oracle Database, including Oracle RAC components)
p13390677_112040_platform_2of7.zip (Oracle Database, including Oracle RAC components)
p13390677_112040_platform_3of7.zip (Oracle Grid Infrastructure, includes: Oracle ASM, Oracle Clusterware, Oracle Restart)

I have only pasted relevant screenshots for the GI Installation and skipped few.

Now you will have to run the root.sh script as root user. root.sh script will ask you to run one of the two scripts depending on the standalone or RAC configuration. In our case we need to execute below script/command for standalone database.

Install Oracle Database Binaries
Set the ORACLE_BASE and ORACLE_HOME (different from Grid Home) and then run the database runInstaller.
I’ve pasted only required screenshots of steps performed during DB installation.

Now we have the Grid and DB software’s installed on our system. Start CSSD service

Now we have Grid Infrastructure and Oracle Database binaries installed.

Step 5:

The next step is to create ASM instance and then the database instance. Before starting the creation of ASM instance we need to ensure that CSSD service is up and running. This can be done by issuing ‘crs_start ora.cssd‘ command.

Now you are free to create the database on ASM storage using dbca or manually. Whatever you are comfortable with.
Below are few of the important steps that you need to follow while creating database using DBCA.